INTERVIEW WITH SUE ATKINSON採訪蘇·阿特金森

Sue Atkinson

Focusing on food photography, Sue’s client list includes most major food brands and retailers in the United Kingdom. Graduate from Royal College of Art in theoretical studies of Photography, and now is precise on how she sets up her work.

SA: Well, I was always interested in painting and fine art. And I felt, right from when I was quite young that this is sort of the area I want to move into the most- English and Art- that would be my subject. And when I actually left school, I left school at 16 because I want to go to further education college, because that was the only opportunity I had to take the art subject further. I actually had a space in my timetable. My best friend said she’s studying photography. I thought that sounds fantastic because I’ve never realized that you could actually study photography. So that was a great opportunity to start looking at it. And funny enough that was actually where I met Mike who was my photography tutor. He had a particularly good way of analyzing and talking about images, which I think, made me more interested in it as a subject more than just painting and art. So actually I went with the art interests, with the intention of doing art and history. When I finished my O Level, A-Level in photography, I went on to do an art foundation course. I just found that I was getting more and more involved with photography. It was much more sort of a spontaneous way of making an image, but it was still very expressive in the way of working. So I thought that was probably the best way to move ahead in terms of my career. So instead of going off to do art and art history and teaching art, I decided to go off to photography. There weren’t any degree courses in those days, so the only course that was open to me was then PCL, which is now Westminster University. There was a part-time day release course- one day a week, part time day release professional photography. So I studied that for three years and I worked in between times. I did a little bit of working with Mike in the studio- he had a studio then- and I did a little bit of teaching as well. I actually was just teaching O-Level photography so I got more and more involved in it. While I was at PCL, I met two people who were very influential. One of them was my tutor Peter Carey who was an advertising photographer, very successful advertising photographer, very focused, quite frightening sort of person. But he really was committed to photography. And you felt that if you could actually do something to please him, then you could do something. I remember one day I heard him talking to one of the other students about food photography. And he was saying ‘no I don’t think you should be a food photographer.’ And I thought, ‘that’s interesting.’ I’ve never thought of being a food photographer, I think maybe that’s what I’d like to do. But I’d spent weeks in the studio with a set of sherry glasses trying to get the lighting right. And I just couldn’t get on with these very sort of finite objects that needed lighting in a particular way. I just felt, I want something more exciting, something more organic would interest me more. I didn’t want to photograph people either. I was quite nervous in a way. I felt working with objects might be easier than working with people. I was very wrong. So I met Peter and he really inspired me to work on food projects. Obviously I had to do a lot of other things but that was something that came to mind. And then my tutor who was the Dean of the university, Margaret Harper, she was a very successful photo historian. She inspired me to do research into the history of photography because she’d been successful commercial photographer in her own right and there was nothing that ever has been written about the history of commercial photography in Britain. So that seemed another opportunity, in a way I got the two sorts of replacement things for the painting and art history. I found I could turn to photography and the history of photography and they had further opportunities available.